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If you are a reader in American cultural or literary history, this book will come as a relief. Although I love Malcolm Cowley, and Walter Lippmann is a hero of mine, not so much for his politics but his life, Kenneth Lynn brings up important thoughts about them that need to be acknowledged. I also love many of the books or people Lynn attacks such as A Scott Berg Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. Lynn voices all those little doubts and the "but wait"s that come to mind when reading about these people who are trotted out in every study of twentieth century culture such as Henry May The End of American Innocence: A Study of First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 or Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type. History can get stuck in reusing the same sources, perspectives on topics can get set. Old criticisms and weaknesses are forgotten and sources become venerated, canonical. Yes books come along to revise these perspectives but often they feel just as entrenched in new dogma. Somehow for me this book avoids that, instead reads very fresh, like someone finally brought these things out in the open and allowed us to think beyond the standard tropes.Lynn's book is a compilation of essays published over a number of years. This is critical when reading this, to read one at a time with a break in between otherwise it reads too personally critical and bitter. Which is the weakness of the book, it comes across as too personal in its criticism. Many times I cringed reading what felt at times as unnecessary vitriol when taking to task these works that the authors labored over. This I would say is the weakness, not acknowledging that the authors such as Ronald Steel or A Scott Berg couldn't cover every last thing or every last point of view.After I read this, I went back and looked at the peer reviews, as this book struck me as unique and not notated and odd for an academic to write but there were many reviews published in academic periodicals which were on the whole positive once they took him to task over the unpleasant tone. Lynn brings up important points, his essay on "The Rebels of Greenwich Village" for example is very useful in thinking about that time and the rhetoric we accept about an era. In the end he reminds us of the complexity of people and topics, even the best of people have lives filled with contradictions and this is true when describing eras too. When we ignore this, then that is when the reading begins to feel dead, sanitized and vacuous, trimmed to fit preconceived ideas. Lynn kicks up the dust a little and ignites some interesting thinking.